Introduction

I've spent significant amounts of time in Germany over the years, and it's given me a real affection for the country's landscape — especially the southwest, around the historic regions of the Rhineland and the Palatinate. It's a part of Germany many tourists pass over entirely, drawn instead to world famous Bavaria or the excitement of Berlin, but for genealogy it's often the key region: the southwest was the source of one of the largest waves of German emigration to North America, driven by decades of war, fragmented land inheritance, and repeated crop failures through the early-to-mid 1800s. Families from this region left in real numbers.

Three Day Exploration

This particular itinerary was designed as a three-day driving tour through the region — a long weekend if you're already in Europe, or worth extending into a full week once you factor in international flights to and from Germany. It's built to give you a genuine, unhurried feel for the villages, churches, and countryside your ancestors knew, without needing to be too long away from home.

This ancestral portion of this itinerary traces the story of Jacob Wickert and Maria Katherin Augustin, who lived in and around Mengerschied, in the Rhein-Hunsrück region, before emigrating with their four surviving children in the autumn of 1867 — sailing from Bremen aboard the ship Hansa, bound for New York, and eventually settling in Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin. Along the way, the itinerary visits the villages of Schönborn and Mengerschied, the surrounding countryside that shaped three generations of the family, and the wider Hunsrück region — a place that endured the devastation of the Thirty Years' War, French rule from 1794, and the catastrophic Mengerschied fire in 1841, before a wave of emigration in the mid-1800s carried families like the Wickerts across the Atlantic in search of a new start.

The full itinerary blended together ancestral & heritage travel and an exploration of two important wine regions, the Mosel Valley and the Alsace region. The Mosel is one of the oldest wine-growing areas in the world, with vineyards planted along its steep, slate-lined slopes since Roman times. It's best known today for Riesling — the vines cling to some of the steepest terrain in Europe, and the slate soil gives the wine its distinctive, mineral character. Alsace, just across the border in France, has its own long and layered winemaking history, shaped by centuries of shifting between French and German rule. Its vineyards, sheltered by the Vosges Mountains, produce some of the world's most highly regarded aromatic white wines, including Riesling, Gewürztraminer, and Pinot Gris.

This itinerary shared with the permission of the family.